OPINION: The University of Cape Town’s Academic Freedom Committee has let intellectual freedom down regarding Professor Nicoli Nattrass’s commentary in the South African Journal of Science.
, and have been deafened by the silence of the UCT Academic Freedom Committee. That is a great worry for what this says about the future of intellectual freedoms in South Africa.
It is useful to distinguish more carefully between academic discourse and political discourse. The academic process is based on independent, critical thinking, on evidence-based research, on reproducibility, on pursuing the truth and so on. Sometimes, from a flawed set of ideas emerge new thinking and new notions, through interrogation, scientific inquiry and iteration.
Does this make political discourse inappropriate at a university? The answer here is, surprisingly, no. Our universities are strongly coupled to the societies in which they are embedded, and academics need to be prepared to defend themselves in the public setting. The public pays our salaries, and so we need to open ourselves to public scrutiny.
I’ve encountered too many people who have looked the other way in the hope that this first step is but an aberration. History shows that when you wait on the sidelines, and when you slip far enough down the road to intellectual bondage, the abnormal becomes the normal. It always comes back to that first step when not many stood up to be counted when it really mattered.
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